F2F #39: Culture breaking point

The startup scene is filled with theories about at what point does company culture break. Some people say 30, some say 50, some say 80. Others, with perhaps bigger companies, like Ben Horowitz, often cite Dunbar's number.

Dunbar's number is the suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person 1. The concept was introduced by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s, who found a correlation between primate brain size (specifically, the neocortex) and average social group size. By extrapolating this relationship to humans, Dunbar proposed that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 stable relationships 2.

Yesterday night, at a Seedrocket event, we were discussing this very same topic with Juanjo Mostazo (Homa Games) and Oriol Vila (HolaLuz). They more or less came to the same number with two different approaches. One argued that it breaks when you start not knowing all the names of your employees, at around 60 people, and the other one argued that it's 30 people per founder. In the case of a company with two founders, it'd meet the 60 people mark, precisely,

I have never created companies that big, but I've been around in many. My previous company, I joined as employee number 20 and left after they were 300+. I've seen other cases in my portfolio companies as angel investor.

My guess is that it also depends on the amount of hours you work. Taking a closer look at the numbers and people who cite them, you see those with insane number of hours per week worked like Elon Musk, Ben Horowitz, Steve Blank and other extra-successful entrepreneurs with a shared trait of pushing family down the priority list of their ambitious life plan: divorces, substance abuse, depression, unattached to their children, etc.

If the first ten employees define your company culture, then the first thirty consolidate it and will bring it to its limits.

Now that we've reached 30 employees at MarsBased, I feel like it's time to act on it, proactively. Our culture hasn't broken, yet, but it might. Knowing this beforehand is paramount to scaling further.

We manage ten people per founder, and that is perfectly fine. Could we do more? Sure, but not under the 40h workweeks we currently have. We could either work more - and that goes against our principle of no overtime ever - or sacrifice something else, which we're also not going to do.

If we are to scale, something's gotta give.

Most startups don't have time to take a couple of days to sit down and ponder. They're too busy trying to find product market fit, the next round, the next milestone to find extra revenues and whatnot.

In our case, we will take extra time to act on our culture before it breaks, as we feel it doesn't exactly befit our team size nor the place we're in (we defined it in the first year and polished it by year 4 with minor changes - and it hasn't changed ever since). And if we want to keep growing the team, we will have to come up with a creative solution to approach our regular team one-on-ones, career plans and all that jazz.